Aircraft destroyed by Buk missile
MALAYSIA Airlines flight 17 was destroyed by a Buk surface-to-air missile over eastern Ukraine, the Dutch Safety Board said yesterday as it presented the results of an official probe into the crash.
The missile’s Russian maker, however, presented its own report hours earlier, trying to clear Russia-backed separatists who controlled the area or Russia of any involvement in the crash on July 17, 2014, that killed all 298 people aboard the plane.
The Dutch investigators said the missile exploded less than a metre from the MH17 cockpit, killing three crew in the cockpit and breaking off the front of the plane. The aircraft broke up in the air and crashed over a large area controlled by rebel separatists who had been fighting government troops there since April 2014.
The board said the plane should not have been flying there as Ukraine should have closed its airspace to civil aviation, adding that nobody gave a thought to the dangers to passenger planes.
The investigators unveiled a ghostly reconstruction of the forward section of MH17. Some of the nose, cockpit and business class of the Boeing 777 were rebuilt from fragments of the aircraft recovered from the crash scene and flown to GilzeRijen air base in southern Netherlands.
Ukraine and Western countries contend that the airliner was downed by a missile fired by Russia-backed rebels or Russian forces, from rebelcontrolled territory.
However, the Russian statecontrolled Almaz-Antey armsmaker contended yesterday that a draft of the Dutch report found the plane was shot down by a Buk missile warhead.
However, Almaz-Antey says it conducted two experiments – in one of which a Buk missile was detonated near the nose of an airplane similar to a 777 – that contradict that conclusion.
The experimental aircraft’s remains showed a much different submunitions damage pattern than seen on the remnants of MH17, the company said in a statement.
The experiments also disputed what it said was the Dutch version, that the missile was fired from Snizhne, a village that was under rebel control. An Associated Press reporter saw a Buk missile system in that vicinity on the same day.
“We have proven with our experiments that the theory about the missile flying from Snizhne is false,” AlmazAntey’s director-general, Yan Novikov, told a news conference in Moscow.
Almaz-Antey in June had said that a preliminary investigation suggested the plane was downed by a model of Buk that was no longer in service with the Russian military but was part of the Ukrainian military arsenal.
Information from the first experiment, in which a missile was fired at aluminum sheets mimicking an airliner’s fuselage, was presented to the Dutch investigators, but was not taken into account, Novikov said. He said evidence shows that if the plane was hit by a Buk, it was fired from the village of Zaroshenske, which Russia says was under Ukrainian government control.
A US official said the draft report said the plane was destroyed by a Buk surface-to-air missile fired from the village of Snizhne.
Many reports, including an investigation by the opensource group, Bellingcat, also suggest that the plane was downed by a missile fired from near Snizhne.
Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte called on Russia to cooperate fully with the criminal investigation.
The Dutch Safety
Board’s report was “an important milestone in the effort to hold accountable those responsible” for the disaster”, the White House said .
“The US will fully support all efforts to bring to justice those responsible.
“Our assessment is unchanged – MH17 was shot down by a surface-to-air missile fired from separatist-controlled territory in eastern Ukraine,” said National Security Council spokesman Ned Price. – Reuters